I personally doubted that Windows 7 would make an actual appearance during the Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer joint interview up on stage at the D6 conference, but as it turns out, it has made an appearance. During an interview conducted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher about Ballmer and Gates' past, present, and future, a short demo was given of Windows 7.

As for the toolkits, .NET is yet to show any advantage over Cocoa, QT or GTK, but if Microsoft officially endorses it and states it will be the only platform supported at all in Windows 8 there are already enough developers ready to replace the old ones that made Windows into the crappy platform that it is with their C++ mishaps.

Here we go again ...

You're partly right. Win32 developers will be quite happy to jump ship to a better development choice, should that opportunity every arise. You are mistaken if you think that C++ developers will jumpship to .NET just because Microsoft makes it the preferred development platform. In many respects, .NET already *is* the development platform that Microsoft pushes. See how VC++ is pushed? As a systems development tool and not an application development one. See how much work goes into making C# GUI development competitive then compare that with how MFC is still left in the late 90s.

MS stopped pushing C++ as a client development language when .NET was introduced. The fact that the majority of client side applications are still written in C++ attests to the failure of this effort. To understand why it fails, you need to ask what developers gain by moving to C#/.NET. You gain a slightly safer language, a more modern class library, but then you lose performance. At this point you can point to the numerous microbenchmarks that show C# equaling or surpassing C++ in speed. Nevertheless, at the end of the day users do not want an application that runs slightly slower, consumes 2x - 3x more memory just to provide exactly the same functionality as what they previously had.

C++ is not _that_ bad. Sure, it could be more newbie friendly but the flexibility and the performance make it more than worthwhile. Blaming Windows failings on C++ is disingenius at best. The majority of the OS itself is written in C, and all of its competitors apart from Apple use either C or C++.

MS will never remove existing non-managed APIs in favor of managed ones. Doing so will force developers to rewrite their code, and what's to stop them from going down the Qt route? They get to keep their existing C++ code and they get portability on top of it. Such a move would be detrimental to Microsoft.

Well, maybe. But I believe that once Windows 3.11/9x API functions are removed from Windows, C++ developer population will slump. Experience tells me that most Windows apps are developed against deprecated APIs and buggy behavior even nowadays. And they suck. And it sucks that Microsoft keeps a buggy system to please crappy developers.